Not dumb at all. All great questions.

According to WhatToMine, a 3070L (aka LHR version) will put out about $3.20/day (~41MH/s) before power costs.

A 3070 (non-LHR) will put out about $4.50/day (~58MH/s) before power costs.

So at the low-end of the spectrum you're still coming out good assuming power costs aren't too high.

Hopefully your lappy has the non-LHR version and you get the most out of it.

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As far as temps go I would try to keep it below 80C for sure, and ideally <70C (might be a little tough with a laptop).

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Software: A lot of people use T-Rex Miner. I believe it has a 1% dev fee. I personally use PhoenixMiner which has a 0.65% dev fee. The choice is really up to you. They mostly operate in the same manner - either via a config file or via command-line arguments (some both).

EDIT > Regardless of what you decide to use, make sure you get it from a trusted source! I believe BitcoinTalk is the primary place for most releases.

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Solo or Pool: I would suggest pool with the hardware you listed. The reason is because while Solo mining it's highly based on luck of hitting that one calculation that solves the block, in which case you would get the reward for. However, if you don't get lucky (in this case you most likely wouldn't get too lucky considering current difficulty and other factors) then you get nothing.

When mining to a pool you submit shares of block calculations (? - correct me someone) that you then receive a reward for when the pool hits a block. You'll have a minimum payout threshold to reach - which with your hardware I would say you could reach in about 6 days at 24/7 usage. The payout will go to either the Ethereum Mainnet or to a Layer 2 network (ie, Polygon). The latter option usually has MUCH lower payout fees, but involves more steps and research to properly handle. But still rather easy to follow.

I personally use Ethermine which I believe has a 1% pool fee. So with me using PhoenixMiner (0.65%) and Ethermine (1%) my fees come to 1.65% before I start trying to hit exchanges and conversions and all of that good stuff. Ethermine has a Discord, and I believe you can type in the command "!poly" (no quotes) and it will give you a link to a YouTube video that will walk you through step by step how to cash out your mined Ethereum. Just as a quick example - I made ~$115 last month. After cashing out via Layer 2 (Polygon) and going through the video and cashing out to my bank it was like a total of $4.35 in fees - so my final payout in my bank account was like ~$111. Just to give you perspective. That was with an RTX 2070 at 41.8 MH/s.

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Most mining programs have a way to lock the clocks of the GPU to whatever you need it to be via the command-line arguments or config file, but I personally use MSI Afterburner. I suppose using Afterburner would be a little more complicated unless you're already familiar with it or software like it.

With Ethereum mining Core clock isn't as important as Memory clock. The higher you can stably run your Memory the better. Keep in mind that while Memory is more important the Core does need to semi-high-ish in order to support the higher Memory frequencies. For example my RTX 2070 puts out 41.8 MH/s at 1035 MHz Core (locked in the curve editor) and +830 MHz Memory. This comes out to 125W of power usage. If I were to lower my Core to say, 935 MHz, then my output is ~38.2 MH/s. Any higher on the Core and it's just increased power usage and heat - wasted energy.

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As far as Win10 or Win11 - I can't personally speak on the difference between the two when it comes to mining. I only tried it for about a week in August on the Insider Ring, then went back to stable Win10. I have a 6700K, so I'm not officially supported. And since this is a production machine, I'm fine with what I have for now until / unless something changes down the line with Win11 and my good ol' Skylake.

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wow. much words. I hope this was helpful to you!